Breakfast of Champions

Breakfast of Champions (1973) provides frantic, scattershot satire and a collage of Vonnegut's obsessions. His recurring cast of characters and American landscape was perhaps the most controversial of his canon; it was felt by many at the time to be a disappointing successor to Slaughterhouse-Five, which had made Vonnegut's literary reputation.

Cat's Cradle

Cat's Cradle is Kurt Vonnegut's satirical commentary on modern man and his madness. An apocalyptic tale of this planet's ultimate fate, it features a dwarf as the protagonist; a complete, original theology created by a calypso singer; and a vision of the future that is at once blackly fatalistic and hilariously funny. A book that left an indelible mark on an entire generation of readers,
Cat's Cradle is one of this century's most important works...and Vonnegut at his very best.

The Sirens of Titan

The richest, most depraved man on Earth, Malachi Constant, is offered a chance to take a space journey to distant worlds with a beautiful woman at his side. Of course, there's a catch to the invitation...

Slaughterhouse-Five

Traumatized by the bombing of Dresden at the time he had been imprisoned, Pilgrim drifts through all events and history, sometimes deeply implicated, sometimes a witness. He is surrounded by Vonnegut's usual large cast of continuing characters (notably here the hack science fiction writer Kilgore Trout and the alien Tralfamadorians, who oversee his life and remind him constantly that there is no causation, no order, no motive to existence).

Mother Night

American Howard W. Campbell, Jr., a spy during World War II, is now on trial in Israel as a Nazi war criminal. But is he really guilty? In this brilliant book rife with true gallows humor, Kurt Vonnegut turns black and white into a chilling shade of grey with a verdict that will haunt us all. Mother Night is a daring challenge to our moral sense.

Player Piano

Kurt Vonnegut's first novel spins the chilling tale of engineer Paul Proteus, who must find a way to live in a world dominated by a supercomputer and run completely by machines. Paul's rebellion is vintage Vonnegut – wildly funny, deadly serious, and terrifyingly close to reality.

Slapstick

Perhaps the most autobiographical (and deliberately least disciplined) of Vonnegut's novels, Slapstick (1976) is in the form of a broken family odyssey and is surely a demonstration of its eponymous title. The story centers on brother and sister twins, children of Wilbur Swain, who are in sympathetic and (possibly) telepathic communication and who represent Vonnegut's relationship with his own sister who died young of cancer almost two decades before the book's publication.

Galapagos

Galapagos takes the listener back one million years to A.D. 1986. A simple vacation cruise suddenly becomes an evolutionary journey. Thanks to an apocalypse, a small group of survivors stranded on the Galapagos Islands are about to become the progenitors of a brave new, and totally different, human race.

Welcome to the Monkey House

Welcome to the Monkey House is a collection of Kurt Vonnegut's shorter works. Originally printed in publications as diverse as
The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction and
The Atlantic Monthly, what these superb stories share is Vonnegut's audacious sense of humor and extraordinary range of creative vision.

Bluebeard: The Autobiography of Rabo Karabekian (1916-1988)

Meet Rabo Karabekian, a moderately successful surrealist painter who we meet late in life and see struggling (like all of Vonnegut's key characters) with the dregs of unresolved pain and the consequences of brutality. Loosely based on the legend of Bluebeard (best realized in Bela Bartok's one-act opera), the novel follows Karabekian through the last events in his life that is heavy with women, painting, artistic ambition, artistic fraudulence, and as of yet unknown consequence.

Ubik

Glen Runciter runs a lucrative business - deploying his teams of anti-psychics to corporate clients who want privacy and security from psychic spies. But when he and his top team are ambushed by a rival, he is gravely injured and placed in "half-life," a dreamlike state of suspended animation. Soon, though, the surviving members of the team begin experiencing some strange phenomena, such as Runciter's face appearing on coins and the world seeming to move backward in time.

Hocus Pocus

Eugene Debs Hartke describes an odyssey from college professor to prison inmate to prison warden back again to prisoner in another of Vonnegut's bitter satirical explorations of how and where (and why) the American dream begins to die. Employing his characteristic narrative device - a retrospective diary in which the protagonist retraces his life at its end, a desperate and disconnected series of events here in Hocus Pocus show Vonnegut with his mask off and his rhetorical devices unshielded.

Jailbird

Walter Starbuck, a career humanist and eventual low-level aide in the Nixon White House, is implicated in Watergate and jailed, after which he (like Howard Campbell in Mother Night) works on his memoirs. Starbuck is innocent (his office was used as a base for the Watergate shenanigans of which he had no knowledge), and yet he is not innocent (he has collaborated with power unquestioningly and served societal order all his life). He represents another Vonnegut Everyman caught amongst forces he neither understands nor can defend.

A Scanner Darkly

Substance D - otherwise known as Death - is the most dangerous drug ever to find its way on to the black market. It destroys the links between the brain's two hemispheres, leading first to disorentation and then to complete and irreversible brain damage. Bob Arctor, undercover narcotics agent, is trying to find a lead to the source of supply, but to pass as an addict he must become a user, and soon, without knowing what is happening to him, he is as dependent as any of the addicts he is monitoring.

Lolita

Savagely funny and hauntingly sad, Lolita is Nabokov's most famous and controversial novel. It is the story of tortured college professor Humbert Humbert and his dangerous obsession with honey-skinned schoolgirl Dolores Haze.

Fahrenheit 451

Guy Montag is a fireman. In his world, where television rules and literature is on the brink of extinction, firemen start fires rather than put them out. His job is to destroy the most illegal of commodities, the printed book, along with the houses in which they are hidden. Montag never questions the destruction and ruin his actions produce, returning each day to his bland life and wife, Mildred, who spends all day with her television "family."

The Count of Monte Cristo

On the eve of his marriage to the beautiful Mercedes, having that very day been made captain of his ship, the young sailor Edmond Dantès is arrested on a charge of treason, trumped up by jealous rivals. Incarcerated for many lonely years in the isolated and terrifying Chateau d'If near Marseille, he meticulously plans his brilliant escape and extraordinary revenge.

The Big Sleep

Los Angeles PI Philip Marlowe is working for the Sternwood family. Old man Sternwood, crippled and wheelchair-bound, is being given the squeeze by a blackmailer and he wants Marlowe to make the problem go away. But with Sternwood's two wild, devil-may-care daughters prowling LA's seedy backstreets, Marlowe's got his work cut out - and that's before he stumbles over the first corpse.

The Man in the High Castle

It's America in 1962. Slavery is legal once again. The few Jews who still survive hide under assumed names. In San Francisco the I Ching is as common as the Yellow Pages. All because some 20 years earlier the United States lost a war - and is now occupied jointly by Nazi Germany and Japan.

Jerusalem

In the half a square mile of decay and demolition that was England's Saxon capital, eternity is loitering between the firetrap tower blocks. Embedded in the grubby amber of the district's narrative, among its saints, kings, prostitutes and derelicts, a different kind of human time is happening. Through the labyrinthine streets and minutes of
Jerusalem tread ghosts that sing of wealth and poverty, of Africa, hymns and our threadbare millennium.

Boggy of Bucks says:"Stunning, Flawed, Fantastic and Poetic. And a bit long."

The Trial [Naxos AudioBooks]

The Trial is one of the great works of the 20th century - an extraordinary vision of one man put on trial by an anonymous authority on an unspecified charge. Kafka evokes all the terrifying reality of his ordeal.

American Gods: The Tenth Anniversary Edition (A Full Cast Production)

Shadow Moon has served his time. But hours before his release from prison, his beloved wife is killed in a freak accident. Dazed, he boards a plane home where he meets the enigmatic Mr Wednesday, who professes both to know Shadow and to be king of America. Together they embark on a profoundly strange road trip across the USA, encountering a kaleidoscopic cast of characters along the way. Yet all around them a storm threatens to break.

The Brothers Karamazov [Naxos AudioBooks Edition]

Fyodor Dostoyevsky is a titanic figure among the world's great authors, and
The Brothers Karamazov is often hailed as his finest novel. A masterpiece on many levels, it transcends the boundaries of a gripping murder mystery to become a moving account of the battle between love and hate, faith and despair, compassion and cruelty, good and evil.

Publisher's Summary

Eliot Rosewater, a drunk volunteer fireman and president of the fabulously rich Rosewater Foundation, is about to attempt a noble experiment with human nature, with a little help from writer Kilgore Trout. The result is Kurt Vonnegut's funniest satire, an etched-in-acid portrayal of the greed, hypocrisy, and follies of the flesh we are all heir to.

As an added bonus, when you purchase our Audible Modern Vanguard production of Kurt Vonnegut's book, you'll also receive an exclusive Jim Atlas interview. This interview – where James Atlas interviews Gay Talese about the life and work of Kurt Vonnegut – begins as soon as the audiobook ends.

This production is part of our Audible Modern Vanguard line, a collection of important works from groundbreaking authors.

...It's hot in the summer and cold in the winter. It's round and wet and crowded. At the outside, babies, you've got about a hundred years here. There's only one rule that I know of, babies—God damn it, you've got to be kind."

I've only got two big rules with my two babies. # 1 be happy, # 2 be kind. Everything else is negotable, babies.

It appears that Kurt Vonnegut independently arrived at the same conclusion. 'God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater' happens to be a fairly straight-forward novel about money and charity and kindness and sanity. Vonnegut's novel (subtitled 'Pearls before Swine') is about the Rosewater family and how they invest their efforts into a foundation as a means of keeping the government from taxing their money. The problem is Eliot Rosewater (the protagonist) ends up not caring much about money and being infinitely charitable and kind. This obviously is a form of insanity that either needs to be exploited (by lawyers) or protected (by family).

In some ways, in its heart, it reminds me of a simplified, satirized version of Dostoevsky's 'the Idiot'. When people are good, selfless, and caring in a world like the one we all live in, they must be stupid or a little nuts. They certainly aren't likely to survive.

17 of 18 people found this review helpful

thomas

charlotte, NC, United States

12/09/13

Overall

Performance

Story

"A Story About Money"

If you could sum up God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater in three words, what would they be?

The Money Shot

What was one of the most memorable moments of God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater?

Vonnegut has so many classic situations in his stories, that not only make you laugh but cry at the same time so its tough. But I would say when Rosewater comes to a moment of clarity at the end of the novel it really pulls the story together in a profound way. You may not like his response, but you must admit that it solidifies his narrative.

Which character – as performed by Eric Michael Summerer – was your favorite?

Rosewater. The images of him living day to day in squalor but being so happy and helping others was well done. "How Can We Help You"....terrific.

Who was the most memorable character of God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater and why?

The woman who called Rosewater up every day was my favorite for some reason. She was the average person who struggles to deal with life, the fact that Rosewater took time for her sums up the treatise of the novel. The everyday contains magical qualities that can never be overlooked, being kind to people is always a good investment.

Any additional comments?

Its almost impossible to review Vonnegut, who is my view is the most over looked and under rated American novelist ever. He wrote some of the best books in the American literary tradition. This book, though dated in some respects is timeless in others. I can understand why some people don't like his work, but if you do you owe it to yourself to listen to this well produced thoughtful version.

4 of 4 people found this review helpful

Alexandria

New York

21/07/14

Overall

Performance

Story

"Not Vonnegut's best, but not bad"

The topic of this book serves as a satirical commentary on American capitalism and the place that money - and the people who have it - hold within society. It is a theme worthy of exploration, but this book lacks the typical spot-on punch of Vonnegut's best work. The message still gets through and in a fairly entertaining fashion, but it falls short of ensuring a lasting impression.

Summerer's narration irritated me at first, but I soon warmed to him. His voice contains a gleeful irony that is perfect for Eliot Rosewater's particular brand of "madness."

1 of 1 people found this review helpful

Edgar Iwamoto

Lexington, KY USA

13/05/17

Overall

Performance

Story

"Timeless Message"

A concept, "slurp-slurp", as applicable in 2017 as it was when this book was written. "Same circus, different clowns." Knowing our history does not prevent its repetition. Bottom line of charitable giving, though, bears repeating.

0 of 0 people found this review helpful

picketfence14

28/01/17

Overall

Performance

Story

"Has never been more relevant."

A much needed dash of insanity in an eerily sane world. Such an interesting book!

0 of 0 people found this review helpful

Michael Krueger

29/07/16

Overall

Performance

Story

"Never to old for a reality check."

The stories are never more interesting as the take away of Kurt Vonnegut, perhaps that is why I have enjoyed so many of the human specimens serve under the appreciative eye of one of the great writers of the 20th century.God Bless you, Mr Rosewater is a homage to a gentle soul, who's goodness is render from a life of obligation, conformity, great wealth and an exhaustive journey of finding ones place in life. Vonnegut observes and documents the lives that inter twine and decorate the cake of one Elliot Rosewater a product of an obtuse ruling class of wealthy Ner'do wells who's only purpose in life is to defend their inherited privilege.

No class or other aberrations of humanity are left unscathed by the authors intimate understanding of human behavior, which he so insightfully created for our own smug enjoyment. God bless Kurt Vonnegut!

0 of 0 people found this review helpful

Jami

VICTOR, NY, United States

02/02/16

Overall

Performance

Story

"Not Sure Vonnegut Is For Me"

Maybe I just don't get Vonnegut or know how to read him, but I am left puzzled by the great reviews. Maybe it was that I listened to it on audio rather than read a print version. Whatever it is....this didn't do much for me.

I found most of the tale to be dull and I wasn't invested in the characters. I understand that this is a satire, but I didn't get the amount of humor that many others seemed to have found. The story was disjointed and meandered, and I felt my mind similarly wandering. On the positive side, I found a few funny parts and I was impressed by the fact that although this was written in 1965, the commentary about the behavior of the rich and privileged still apply today. I didn't feel that the story was dated at all.

I did bump up my rating from a two star to a three star after thinking about the ending. I like how the ending showed that Elliott Rosewater was "crazy like a fox" as the cliché goes!

Still not sure if I will try another Vonnegut or not. Definitely not in the near future.

0 of 0 people found this review helpful

harry

23/01/16

Overall

Performance

Story

"Not my favorite but Vonnegut none the less"

Somewhat tedious imho, but feels much more substantial toward the end. I tend to lean towards his more other-worldly themes as this is more "real" than tralfamadore. His allegories hit home, with resignment and resolve just as Vonnegut fans would expect.

0 of 0 people found this review helpful

N

Oakleigh South, Australia

18/10/15

Overall

Performance

Story

"Examination of What Money Means in the USA"

Would you recommend this audiobook to a friend? If so, why?

Yes, it is clever and examines the role of money our lives in a very personal, yet detached manner. It is an interesting book. It is not sci-fi fyi sort of a social commentary.

What was one of the most memorable moments of God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater?

Hearing about Diana Moon Glampers.

Have you listened to any of Eric Michael Summerer’s other performances before? How does this one compare?

No. He read it most excellently, a joy to hear.

Did you have an extreme reaction to this book? Did it make you laugh or cry?

Sort of, I listened to it twice! It sort of gets to you.

Any additional comments?

Unusual book, sort of like Citizen Kane, a made up tale of America, so we can learn about ourselves.

0 of 0 people found this review helpful

DobieChuck

Colorado

27/08/15

Overall

Performance

Story

"Some Good Vonnegut"

As usual Vonnegut makes us laugh and smirk, while peppering us w/ sly, sneaky, and superb social commentary... His style and voice are always beautiful, and this one does not disappoint either... Many of the ideas are still entirely relevant today... The difference between Elliot and dad Rosewater is classic yin and yang... right vs left liberal vs conservative down home vs downtown haves and have nots etc... Not the best Vonnegut, but very good, and still better than almost anyone at what he did... I enjoyed the narrator and felt he fit the story very well...

1 of 2 people found this review helpful

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